NOW WE ARE TEN

Well it`s about time I reckon, ten years since I went it alone. That`s a decade of issuing funny records for interesting people, and what better way to celebrate that than to issue the first ever sampler. And it`s not just a sampler of recordings issued, oooh nooooo. This sampler includes 7 tracks that have not been issued before. And to top it all, this 23 track sampler retails at a celebratory bargain price of just #4.99. Or a fiver. The CD also comes with an eight page booklet revealing a 4000 word potted history of Trunk activities that you might find bloody interesting.

Here is also the massive amount of copy — a potted Trunk Records story in 4,000 word, complete with spelling mistakes, as is the Trunk tradition. I`ve put it here as it may be easier to read here than on the CD booklet:

Now I say ten years, well Trunk records was started a bit before then, but it was in 1997 that I bought ou the other three members and went it alone. The label created a bit of a stir back in 1995 with its debut release, the first ever library compilation simply called The Super Sounds Of Bosworth. This was an album pulling together music from a weird old library I`d found, with strange and esoteric electronics, jazz and Marmite commercial music from the mid 60s and early 1970s. It was strangely contemporary sounding and many people asumed it was a piss-take or spoof and thought the music was all new. Well it wasn`t and the album was picked up by all sorts of funny people and ended up being sampled by Everlast, David Holmes, loads of artists all over the place. But we didn`t make any money out of it. And then lots of other library records started coming out on other labels, which was great really because library music is really an incredible source of ideas and beautiful sounds. But more about that later. After the Bosworth album came a remix project of it. Interesting and a little strange were the results, which included a bonkers live recording by former members of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band and the Temperance Seven. After that followed an incredibly important release, the first ever issue of The Wicker Man soundtrack. I`d spent about three years tracking down the legal owners and got their permission finally to issue a limited number of CDs and vinyl. The press went mad about it, people started sending me bits of the original charred Wicker Man in the post and in turn I started having nightmares about being burned alive. After only two weeks of release the vinyl had sold out and Mojo magazine printed that it was the most collectable record of all time apparently - already people were paying #120 for a copy. Mental really, but beautiful, powerful and important music all the same no matter how much you pay. Shame it was a limited edition really. After that came even more rare soundtrack material. First up was the ridiculously catchy and unreleased theme to Screen Test, a track penned by the great Sydney Dale. It`s a kooky big band number that got people`s nostalgic bell a ringing and a dinging. It was issued only as a handmade 7 inch, and sold out almost immediately. About the same time I made a call to Oliver Postage, the legend responsible for writing such delights as Bagpuss and Ivor the Engine. I asked him if it was possible to issue the classical space music for The Smallfilms production of The Clangers. He was up for, I got to meet him and eat soup, and also got to meet his animation partner Peter Firmin. The Clangers album on release scored 10 out of 10 in the NME, a classic review written by Andy Capper who later went on to edit Vice Magazine. Good man! The Clangers was issued on CD and vinyl, the first 26 copies of the vinyl came in pink hand-knitted sleeves, with The Clangers in gold wool on the front. Very sweet indeed. Other reviews praised it as perfect pastoral space music, and I still agree. Bob Stanley reviewed it with the classic headline Spacemen Twee. Sweeeet. The Clangers sold well, but it was Christmas afterall. I`d been working on and off in music for few years by now and had met some weird people, especially musicians, along the way. As a result I`d started learning about Logic and that other computer programmes that help you make music and I`d begun remixing funny old folk records in my spare time. One of the results was The Snow It Melts the Soonest with a ridiculous B side I`d made with the Mount Vernon Arts Lab. He`d asked me to remix a track of his, and all I did was drop a violent phonecall over the top of his original electronic tune which seemed to work quite well. The two came out as a 7 inch and disappeared fairly fast, probably thanks to the folk and swearing in equal measures. My real passion remained though with British film and TV music. Another great lost recording, up there with The Wicker Man in my opinion was the music to Ken Loach`s Kes. It`s a gritty Northern tale brilliantly shot and beautifully enhanced by a John Cameron pastoral score, played with incredible style and tenderness by a killer British modern jazz line up - notably with Harold McNair on flute and penny whistle. I contacted John Cameron and you couldn`t wish to meet a nicer guy. He had the original tapes in a box in his shed, and with a little jigging about and hundreds of phonecalls I finally got permission to release the whole recording. It came as a one-sided slab of vinyl and a CD, but in both cases had quite brilliant sleevenotes written by Jarvis Cocker, a big fan of the film. The Trunk mantra of sex, nostalgia and music then really came into play. I`d already had a bit of sex thanks to some of The Wicker Man recordings, but now Trunk was in for a whole lot more with the release of some lost Mary Millington tapes. Millington was the porn queen of England throughout the 1970s, she tragically committed suicide but left behind a legacy of cheeky films, amazingly collectable photos and some strange spoken word material. Her words were released as a limited 12, simply called Mary Millington Talks Dirty, and so she did for about 20 minutes. The record sold out in about a day and I regularly get hassled to repress it. The filth continued with the UKs first ever pressing of the score to Deep Throat. Nice, and not nice at the same time but the opening cue found favour with those loonies called The Animal Collective, and I can hear why. All this sex was appropriately followed by God. Yes God. Oh Lord, yes, Trunk went religious with the release of Resurrection, a killer compilation of holy jazz, altar rock and Christian freakout. Hippy heaven indeed. The last we heard it had been sampled by that bloke Milo on his Destroy Rock and Roll album. But what do we know eh? Then it was back to the rude stuff. I`d been working part time with my sister who was a soft porn star. You know, tits and bums and that. She was very popular and had her own Fan Club. I had some part time work dealing with the fan mail that came in. Some of it was a bit 'different'. I started to collect it, and one day, nearly by complete accident I showed a couple of letters to a actor friend of mine known as Wisbey. He immediately started reading the letters out like Cary Grant and it just seemed to work as a good idea for a release. So a few months later I recorded him reading and singing out some of the letters and issued a 7 inch of them on spunky white vinyl called Dirty Fan Male. They all sold out very fast and before I knew it people were reciting some of the letters to me, which was a bit unexpected. It obviously struck a cord with some people an so I hired a studio and made a whole album of Wisbey reading out even more. It too was called Dirty Fan Male and no one bought it. So I quickly moved on, and met a funny bunch of talented musical writers and players operating under one of the worst names I have ever heard - Transcargo. I mean what does that mean? Anyway, they had written some groovy songs, one I really really liked called Oh Boy. I agreed to issue it on a 12 with a full colour sleeve, which cost a bloody fortune. This was followed up by an album which cost another bloody fortune too as it was all in colour as well. I also paid out heavily for a radio plugger and a press plugger and bugger all happened which was a shame as I though the music was just perfect for TV and radio and brilliant for car adverts. It was a hard and expensive lesson to learn, and I couldn't believe no one wanted to buy it and all that combined time, effort and money had gone to waste. The band were disappointed too. So I went back to what I knew best - old unreleased film music and eventually issued the psycho rock oddity monster thing known as the soundtrack to Psychomania. This had never been issued before and was another wee beastie lying quietly in the shed of jazzy John Cameron. Psychomania is a classic slice of insane British film making, about these bikers who kill themselves and return as the living dead. Great film, great dark music. The score came out and for the first time I made some weird tee shirts with Psychomania on them. Loads of people (about 18) bought them for their girlfriends. So, I was back on track, and then I got this phonecall from a bloke in Italy wanting to use a Transcargo track called Oh Boy on a car commercial. Brilliant I thought. Brilliant the band thought. And the money it brought in replaced all the cash spend on promoting an album that didn't sell. It was like getting out of jail and passing Go again. It`s still a great album, it`s just that no one ever noticed. After Psychomania and the car advert came something a whole lot stranger. I`d been trying to find this mad drummer bloke from Hull for some while; I had some of his records and they weren't really like any others I`d come across. Andy - the bloke who always wore black from Intoxica records was a big fan of him too. His name was Basil Kirchin. The only reference you could find of him was his name written on the famous Nurse With Wound list of influences. After a long search I finally tracked him down and wrote to him. I heard nothing. About a month later this massive parcel arrived from Basil Kirchin, loads of music and a strange letter that was more of a cry for help than anything else. He said he`d been waiting for someone like me to find him for years, and just wanted more people to hear his music. I moved quickly. But the first Kirchin recording I issued was a massive risk, as I`d never issued anything quite like it. I remember the decision making process very well. I was lying down in my front room drifting off to this wonderful ambient noise thing, the like of which I had never heard before. I couldn't describe it at all, I just knew it was very special. I woke up about 30 minutes later to these screams and disturbing guttural cries, I thought my house was drowning and people were terrified and dying everywhere. But I realised quickly I was alone, everything was alright, and it was the same recording I had drifted off too now making noises I just couldn`t understand. I had no doubt others had to experience it, so I issued the album, called Quantum shortly afterwards. Basically it`s an incredible collage of stretched sound all handmade in 1973 but never heard before. The risk seemed to pay off as listeners from all around the world got in touch and all of a sudden Basil Kirchin was being written about in broadsheets, in the music press, all over the place. People realised he was the Grandfather of ambient music, the influence behind Brian Eno. And once Quantum was up and running I went back to the sex, and issued a CD of flexi disk recordings from the mid 1970s. They had all been issued British porn mags and were as rubbish and as filthy as they were good. The album was issued as simply Flexi Sex and starred such 70s talent as Juicy Lucy and Irish Annabel. The vinyl copies were supposed to be in pink wax but came out a sort of knobby purple colour. They all sold out in about half an hour and I wished I pressed up more. The album was well received in some funny places, if you know what I mean. This rude album was then followed by a little more culture, in other words some lost Basil Kirchin recordings for a film about mental disorders. Charcoal Sketches / States of Mind was the name of the the release and it came out with lovely cover art and disappeared just as fast. Interest in Kirchin and his work was obviously increasing, and even The Wire and this cool cat from the USA called Alan Licht did this very large six page thing all about him with pictures too. Basil Kirchin had weirdly arrived. But he was very ill, had only one eye left and Cancer of just about everything, but because all of a sudden people knew who he was he went back into the studio at the age of 70 something and got into writing music. Brilliant. Next up was something slightly less spectacular, a first album by me me me. Called The Inside Outside, it was a result of the writing and sampling I`d been doing for a few years and I`d finally cobbled together an album`s worth of material. I issued it and it was nowhere near as bad as I thought it would be. The opening track got picked up by Colette (a chic fashion shop) in Paris and this funny Japanese animator used six of the tracks from the album on a series of animated films about this funny black blob with long legs and blinking eyes. The last time I heard a track was on a BBC ident for a new food programme. Food I thought. Weird I thought. But not quite as weird as the next Trunk release - the lost music from George A. Romero`s classic horror Dawn Of The Dead. Film and music fanatic Joel Martin put me onto to his compiled list of De Wolfe library music that Dario Argento had originally picked for Romero's gorefest. We both agreed it would make for some groovy weird listening. So I got in touch with the De Wolfe music library and before you could say something really quick the album was out and causing a stir on horror forums and places like that. And then a few months later we found bootlegs of it all over the shop. More unreleased Trunk treasures followed, with the first ever vinyl release of Barry Gray`s music from Gerry Anderson`s kinky space series UFO. What music! What sounds! What breaks! What organ! What a cover! The release was oversubscribed and within a week or so copies were floating around ebay and selling for stupid money. Like really stupid money. And I didn't even save any for myself. Anyway, I moved quickly on and more super rare recordings came next with a release of the beguiling library sounds of Basil Kirchin. He`d worked for most libraries over the years, but his best work was for the De Wolfe library in about 1966. His pick-up group at the time had included a young Jimmy Page and jazzman Tubby Hayes, and the release, called Abstractions Of The Industrial North proved conclusively that Kirchin was way ahead of the crowd. Such blissful sounds, such sadness, tenderness and madness all at the same time. The album got an amazing review in Mojo magazine, and thank heavens Basil saw it about a week before he died. It confirmed to him that people were really listening to him, which to any musicians is the only way. Even more obscure and beautiful sounds arrived with the next Trunk release, Music Of The Future. This was one of the most bizarre listens you could ever treat your ears to, a magnum opus originally privately pressed in the late 1950s by an x-spitfire pilot who opened a nightclub in Ireland and made music by throwing electric fans into pianos. Desmond Leslie was his name and his personal take on Music Concrete didn`t really impress anyone apart from me. I still love it and long for more people to hear how insane music can be when you destroy your musical instruments and record the sound it makes. By this time and quite unexpectedly Dirty Fan Male had come back into the frame. Danny Baker had started playing it on his weird breakfast radio show, and a music journalist by the name of Alexis Petridis had contacted me and told me how genuinely interesting Dirty Fan Male was. He called it Audio Prozac. This if you remember was the recording made using letters sent to my porn star sister. Well, Alexis planted an odd seed: he suggested I develop the Dirty Fan Male CD into some kind of comedy show, and maybe take it to the Edinburgh Fringe. I took his words seriously and before I knew it a small show was on the way over the border and a live performance was up an running in a small cave just of the Cowgate for a whole month. After a nervous couple of days playing to about three people the show picked up speed and press, and all sorts of very interesting people appeared out of nowhere and came to see the show. It was an eventual sell-out, a hit show and within about 4 weeks I had a book deal to write all about it. At the same time I put together a more interesting book all about record library album cover art with a company called Fuel who really are possibly the most pleasant and like-minded folks I have ever had the pleasure of working with. A new and slightly expanded Dirty Fan Male album was issued with the Dirty Fan Male book and what better way to follow it all up with than the music to Bod. Yes Bod. The Bod. That Bod. Bod the cartoon. Trouble was there was only 45 seconds of music in the whole series and I had to make a 45 minute album out of it. Well with the help of another Wisbey I went to meet Derek Griffiths who made all the music. I interviewed him, as well as Ali Cole and her brother Lo - son and daughter of Michael and Joanne Cole who created the series. Eventually a beautiful Bod CD thing was made, a great story was told with some charming and historic recollections. The Bod release also brought us the first ever Trunk picture disc, perfect for turning into a clock or of course listening to. Even more TV nostalgia appeared next with the first ever release of the Tomorrow People music. A classic sci-fi series from the early and mid 1970s, this was a originally a non-commercial musical recording pressed by the Standard Music library. It`s brilliant, sparse electronics from the very late 1960s by Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgeson, two important radiophonic workshoppers working in this case under pseudonyms. People got excited. A few months later things remained just as vintage, stille exciting but slightly less electronic with the next Trunk issue, a sublime piece of rural and childish loveliness, called Fuzzy Felt Folk. Put together with the help of the Rev. Martin Green, this release represented the charming and naive side of the British folk sound. It was the first time I had dabbled again with folk since The Wicker Man, and it included rural tales, lunar grooviness and unreleased serial killer charm. Oh, how the children danced. This was quickly followed up by quite a sad story. I`d been digging about trying to find Mike Sammes, the classy but ever-so-slightly forgotten vocal harmony master. Timing is everything in this business and I`d got to him just as he was admitted into hospital. He died a few weeks later and his neighbour had asked me to come to Mike`s home and rescue some of his belongings before they were all incinerated. In the quick rescue operation I managed to salvage a box of old advertising demos. A year or so later and with the help of The Quadfather an album of them was released - called Music For Biscuits it was the first ever slab of classic British vocal advertising madness unleashed on an unsuspecting public. With harmonies to die for, tractor adverts to sing along to and themes for Toast Toppers it was pure magic. And even more magic followed fast, with Inner Space, the first contemporary compilation of music by Sven Libaek. A man you may not have heard, Sven made some of the most beautiful and warm sound you could ever wish to encounter. A Norwegian now living in Australia, he made soundtracks to Australian surf movies, to TV underwater films and lovely sounds for other stuff no one really knows about. I put a shark image on the front and everyone got scared. And then I dived back to Basil Kirchin. He`d sent me his last recording just before he passed away and I had sat on it for about a year. Then his widow phoned me up in tears and asked me if I`d issue it. How could I refuse? So out the album came, but the timing was tragic as Mrs Kirchin died a week before it was ready so she never got to see the lovely thing it turned into. More jazz followed, the first ever release of the UKs rarest British jazz record, penned by another of my musical heroes, pianist Michael Garrick. Things really couldn`t get more super really. So I thought I`d do this compilation. It was about time, a whole ten years since I went it alone. Right, that was the past, what about the Trunk future? Well the music business all looks a bit unpredictable at the moment: we have a failing market, a lethargic scene where vinyl and CD is no longer seen as essential, collectors shops are closing, on-line is all fussy, the effortless MP3 download is edging in, stores are edging out, what a bloody nightmare. But for Trunk Records the future looks alright. I have some incredible lost music to issue including some odd lost synthy madness, a magical horror score from 1973 that badly needs sampling by some grime nutter, an incredible unheard masterpiece by Herbie Hancock (yes, Herbie Hancock) and some killer jazz that makes me wet my knickers. And hopefully now that you`ve found Trunk Records you may take a no risk gamble and buy some of the incredible lovely albums I have already issued. Welcome friend to a brave, new and quite old world of sound.